Retsef Levi

Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Management and a Professor of Operations Managementat the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Levi’s current research is focused on the design and performance analysis of efficient algorithms for fundamental stochastic and deterministic optimization models that arise in the context of supply chains, revenue management, logistics, and healthcare. These fundamental, multistage stochastic models are typically difficult to solve optimally, both theoretically and in practice. Hence, it is important to develop efficient heuristics that provide provably near-optimal policies for these hard models. Levi has a special interest in cost-balancing techniques, data-driven (sampling-based) algorithms, and modern linear programming-based approximation techniques applied to models in the above domains. In addition, he is interested in stochastic and combinatorial optimization and mathematical programming in their broad definition, especially in their intersection with problems that arise in the context of real-life applications. Levi is affiliated with MIT’s Master of Science Program in Computation for Design and Optimization.

He was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel, and served for about 12 years as an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces. In 2005, he received the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences awarded by the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Levi holds a BS in mathematics from Tel-Aviv University and a PhD in operations research from Cornell University.